Business Model: Create a Platform for an Experience

"When you design the business around the experience, (instead of the experience around the business) you create a more powerful and relatable offer."

[Colin Raney]

I love examples of flipping the question around to get to a new place. It's my favorite definition of conversations that connect ideas and people. With social media, many agencies recommend adding an additional layer of amplification around your business.

Activating your social graph, of course, starts when you have one. A step that seems to get the fast-forward treatment in favor of the campaign or thing proposed. The true definition of creative work is looking at the business model as the platform to design the experience for the buyer.

Businesses as value creating systems

All organizations are in need of strength, endurance, and resilience, not just start ups. Of course, it's easier when you can bolt these ideas on the business model right off the gate.

This is how you do "in service of your customers", how you "humanize" the business. Not by sending out lots of messages with exclamation marks in your tweets.

Look a the Netflix example in the deck. It has everything to do with how you query the data vs. the data you can collect, and "measure". This part is getting drowned in a sea of ROI mantra chants. Get to the heart of things, how you're going to make money, and you answer all those questions downstream.

Change the questions, change the results

You can see on slides 40 and 41. The helpful questions are about the experience, which then leads to looking at what you measure to answer them.

do customers like the service? [not Facebook like, buy it like; e.g., the number of unique donwloads, average time engaged, average of repeat purchases]

will customers pay (how much)? [you do A/B testing for landing pages, organize them by market/items; this will give you information on price sensitivity]

which content is best supported?

what is technically feasible?

how will we message? [I prefer the term communicate]

In fact, break down the modern marketing method (communicating, conversation, listening and observing) and match it to the right marketing task (executions), and it will lead you to a variety of objectives all done with the right intent (influence).

It's not that damn hard to do social media

Business is. That's where you think about how you're going to deliver your product or service, how that will evolve your organization, and how you can keep learning from what works. Raney calls it prototyping and learning up.

What business are you in? Whose needs are you filling? How can you design the experience? Which in turn designs the business?

Comments

We just had a conversation about charismatic brand experiences. To achieve them, retail platforms must start in consumers’ minds and get at the heart of what, when, where and why consumers buy. It’s not enough to build campaigns that answer these questions. Every aspect of the retail platform must scream, “We meet consumers’ needs.”

I'm suggesting everything should be organized around the business: Organizations are in need of strength, endurance, and resilience. It's the way in which they go about it that needs retooling. Companies are working with 20th Century business models when customers are using 21st Century work and collaboration tools to connect and get things done.

This flip is so intuitive, yet most businesses don't think like this. Everything is organized around the business, I think, because that's the risk averse way to think. Designing your business around the experience, takes guts. That's why a company like Netflix is dominating, and others are finding it hard to catch up.